I turned 40 and missed my end of 2014 deadline for my film. What am I doing with my life?
Using type I could describe of my thoughts and feelings, but let's be more oral than literate. Yesterday I filmed myself for five minutes, committed edit and post a video in a day. Here's a moving picture update on my life:
If you visited this site before 1999 and you have some memory of the site in the context of the web at that time, I might want to interview you / video you / ask you to appear as a talking head in my upcoming video. Please lemme know if that's something you might share: justin@links.net. Thanks!
more details here:
I've been friends with this writer, editor, teacher Howard Rheingold for over 20 years now. A year or so ago, Howard suggested I come give a talk about my experiences sharing my life on the web to a class he was teaching at a local university. Afterwards, he suggested that if I could make a short film with that story, it would be useful for other professors teaching about the history of digital media.
This fall, I helped edit a video with Howard about his Alchemagical Lucid Dream Box
So in May 2014, I put aside The Justin Hall show and focused full time on a documentary. I thought it would take 3-4 months, and I would aim for 20 minutes. Now, seven months later, I'm not finished with the film and it's about 40 minutes long.
I think my film is a decent piece of work; my friends have told me it has some strengths. There are two key weaknesses I've identified today:
1. I retreated from deeply personal online sharing in January 2005, just as social networks were beginning to take off. What did I learn and how do I see online sharing today? I've touched on this in my film, and in this recent interview with Innovation Hub from WGBH, but folks I respect want a deeper articulation. I think I need to summon some unscripted anguish, because I don't have an easy answer but I want to speak to the convergence of freedom, technology and community. With brevity.
2. Why was "Justin's Links" notable? Why should anyone care about this old web site and this guy talking at them?? It's a strange thing to make an autobiographical film without working hard to prove my own worth: I've hewn towards telling my story, my experience, more than ranking myself externally. But the film needs some of that context, what was interesting about my site?, in order to have some long term prospects. Between the links of my life and the links of the web was Justin's Links from the Underground and @#$!@$! was worthwhile about that in the mid-1990s??
If you visited this site before 1999 and you have some memory of the site in the context of the web at that time, I might want to interview you / video you / ask you to appear as a talking head in my video. Please lemme know if that's something you might share: justin@bud.com
I turned 40 on Tuesday 16 December. I said I wanted to finish this film by that time, so I could shift to other projects including exploring the potential for bud.com to promote health, justice and good feelings. But this film has gotten good enough that I can't release it yet. I'm fighting my own impatience to make this worth inflicting on folks curious about the early web, decades from now. And maybe you can help me out! Thanks for your attention :-) the film will end up here and on 20links.vhx.tx.
